In our annual Best of the West special, we present inspiring individuals and organizations who remind us of the better angels of our nature and our shared American goodness. Below, meet Seth Hopkins.
In his first inaugural address, at a particularly fraught time in American history, President Abraham Lincoln gave us the glorious, famous expression “the better angels of our nature.” It was 1861. The country was hopelessly divided. The Civil War loomed. But Lincoln appealed to his “dissatisfied fellow countrymen,” invoked our common foundation as Americans, and made a pitch for peace. “We are not enemies, but friends,” Lincoln said. “We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
Editor’s Note: Stay tuned for the entire 2022 class of C&I Heroes who exemplify those better angels and the best of our American character.
Seth Hopkins
He helped create one of the country’s top art museums from the ground up and is broadening the experience of Western art within.
When Seth Hopkins cut the ribbon back in 2003 on the project that he helped imagine and build from scratch, he had high hopes for great success. And the Booth Western Art Museum in Cartersville, Georgia, has exceeded his wildest dreams. Not only was it ranked the top art museum in the country in two USA Today 10Best Reader’s Choice Awards, it’s also affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution.
Designed to look like a modern pueblo, the 120,000-square-foot museum has become a pilgrimage site for people who love the West and for anyone interested in American history. “Our Western heritage is very important to our history — both the glorious moments and the tragic,” Hopkins says. “The Western experience is one of the things that made America a great country.”
On the museum’s walls hang historical Western artworks by such masters as Charles Russell and Frederic Remington, and the museum has the largest space for displaying contemporary Western art in the country. “Half of the building is dedicated to the best traditional art being made today. And we’ve tried to make the ‘Western’ art tent bigger and say that the category is big enough for that and more,” Hopkins says. “Andy Warhol’s Western art is a major landmark in modern American art history. You can come here and see an exhibition of that along with the best of other contemporary works and juxtapose that with art that’s more traditional — you get the best of both worlds.”
It’s that kind of horizon-broadening vision that makes Hopkins a hero in today’s Western-art world. “The Booth’s success is a direct reflection of Seth Hopkins’ expertise in the art of the American West: his vision and his leadership, along with his staffing, programming, and educational and community outreach,” one reader wrote in nominating him. “What he has built at the Booth is truly making an everyday difference to me and many like me.”
From our May/June 2022 issue
Photography: Courtesy Booth Western Art Museum
